


on rats and men

by potted_music



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 05:27:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17016582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: Billy wanted to get into the Discovery Service because it would be cold: cold, dark and quiet.





	on rats and men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MildredMost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MildredMost/gifts).



> For MildredMost, who wanted to know "what the fucking hell is Gibson's DEAL?" My guess is, PTSD and feeling as hard done by as Hickey, but in other areas, that's his deal. Thank you so much for the prompt, it was a joy to play with!  
> The biography of historical!Gibson is outlined in "Scattered Memories and Frozen Bones Revealing a Sailor of the Franklin Expedition, 1845-48" by Glenn M. Stein.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!

His dreams are a quagmire of blood rotting in tropical heat. He wanted to get into the Discovery Service because it would be cold: cold, dark and quiet. No bodies laid out on deck like select cuts at a butcher’s shop, no relentless glare of the sun transforming what was alive and laughing into atrocious muck, no hellish heat licking his skin with a sticky tongue. Too bad he brought his nightmares with him, packed tightly at the bottom of his sea chest with his best shore-going clothes reserved for when they return triumphant, or deeper even, lapping unseen at the inside of his veins. They have barely reached open ocean, steamers having towed them a scant 50 miles west of the Orkneys by nightfall, and he’s already ill at ease with memories. These stowaways, awoken by the rocking motion of the ship, come out to play and wreak havoc in his mind.

He wakes up because he cannot breathe, presses a clammy palm to his mouth to stifle a scream and hold in nausea. Sweat is drenching his nightshirt; fingers against his lips shake so badly he can almost hear small bones rattle. He feels like an intruder in his body, memories its rightful, if cruel masters.

He realizes he’s crying, suddenly sorry for himself. He hasn’t seen anything half the crew hasn’t, it’s not unlikely even that he’s seen less than many, so how come he’s the only one who can neither leave the memories behind nor feel any pride in his service to the country? He feels a headache coming on. He should get a cup of water. He should take a walk, shake off the clinging threads of dreams. He cannot move. He breathes in and out, listening to the creaks and sighs of the ship around him.

When he finally opens his eyes, there’s a dark figure standing at the door to his berth: something that crawled out of the nightmare to trail blood across his waking hours, or worse yet, someone noticing his distress and ready to report him as unfit for the expedition. Panic spiking up again, he scrambles up his bed into a sitting position.

“What are you doing here?” His voice sounds squeaky, even to his own ears.

Noticing his fear, the figure, silhouetted by the dim lights from the corridor, lifts open palms in a conciliatory gesture and whispers in what was probably meant to sound soothing, but sounds cloyingly ingratiating instead, “I just heard you groan, sir. I thought you might need some help?”

The tone alone is enough to recognize the man, even without the glint of a lamp on his red hair. The caulker’s mate, a sneaking unpleasant pest doing as little work as possible and entertaining the seamen with long-winded irreverent tales to make up for the fact that he’s not pulling his weight. Hickey’s the name, Billy remembers, not without some effort. He wipes his brow, finally relaxing.

“Aftereffects of malaria,” he says, which is true enough, if not the whole truth, and repeats, “What are you doing here?”

The answer’s obvious enough: the man’s shirking watch duty on deck by loitering in the seamen’s mess, separated from Billy’s cabin only by a flimsy wall.

“Shouldn’t you be somewhere else?” Billy asks, calling up all the authority he can muster.

Instead of scarpering, the man walks in and presses the back of his palm to Billy's forehead, the presumptuous gesture and the touch of a cold hand calling up old memories of his ma. Hickey clucks his tongue.

“My, you are burning up.” His palm lingers, not unpleasantly, against Billy's forehead, steady and cool when he himself is anything but. “I have a little something to make it better.”

The hand finally retreats as the man reaches into the inner pocket of his coat to pull out a flask, but then, instead of giving it to Billy, he holds it to his lips, his other hand cradling the back of Billy’s head. For a second, his fingers tangle and pull on Billy’s hair before resting comfortably against the nape of his neck. The pain lingers though, and Billy thinks with a start, this is the man who’ll hurt you. The thought comes unbidden and so absurd that he laughs, choking as grog burns his throat.

Billy’s never been much for drinking, but the insistent press of metal against his lips and a cool palm against the back of his head make it easier to submit and obey than to argue, especially in his present wicked state. After the first hasty gulps, the man nods and lets go of the back of his head to wipe grog dribbling from the corner of his lips with an unexpectedly soft thumb. Billy leans forward, resting his forehead on his knees, and breathes, carefully weighing whether he will vomit or not.

“You've not used up your rations?” he asks when the worst of the nausea passes.

“You never know when someone might need it more, sir,” the man says, clapping him on the shoulder, obviously in no hurry to leave. “So, you were in the sort of climes that breed malaria?”

“Africa,” he says reluctantly, and adds, “then China, then Borneo with our Lt. Hodgson. You?”

There’s a soft chuckle. “Oh, nothing so exciting.”

Coast patrol in the Channel then, Billy assumes: the man’s experienced enough to have ended up here on The Terror, but not experienced enough to see the mundanity of his earlier service as a blessing.

***

When Billy hurries towards the warrant officers’ mess in the morning, balancing a tray laden with freshly baked buns and jam, he catches sight of Hickey in the far corner of the seamen’s mess. The man is struggling to bring a spoonful of gruel to his mouth against the pitching of the ship, his coat and the table around him a map of an archipelago of his earlier failures. Thomas Hartnell, seated a safe distance across from his, is putting up a truly heroic effort not to laugh. That’s strange, Billy thinks; the Channel might make for easier sailing than the Atlantic, but still, someone too clumsy to eat on a ship, and on a nice morning like this too, is a rare sight. The man might be a nuisance and a loafer, but it wouldn’t do to see him starve, so he makes the point of catching Hickey’s gaze across the room on his way back to the kitchen, then mimes holding a plate in a way that is least likely to result in the gruel ending up in either Hickey’s lap, or his neighbour’s.

It proves a decidedly mixed blessing before long though: Billy has barely finished clearing the table in the warrant officers’ mess when The Terror pitches and rolls with a gale. He doesn’t envy the poor sods stuck on deck in this weather, he thinks, preparing to sit down for his own late breakfast in the seamen’s mess, where the bustle has thankfully subsided by now.

Being alone is a pleasant rarity in the cramped quarters of the ship, but Billy doesn’t manage to get in more than a few spoonfuls before a groan from a corner breaks his illusion of solitude. He startles, catching a glimpse of a familiar red head.

“You are making a habit of sneaking up on me, Mr. Hickey,” he says as the man doubles up over a tin bucket and heaves, vomiting the breakfast he fought so hard to gobble up in the first place.

“Don’t laugh,” the man rasps between bouts of puking in a voice that would have sounded menacing under any other circumstances. Well, if Mr. Hickey cannot take a slight and is quick to see one where none is intended, Billy thinks irritably, maybe he should work harder to prove himself an exemplary seaman. And yet, while dignity is not something one can afford in the tight press of humanity on board, and Mr. Hickey’s prickly disposition might cause trouble in the future, it’s not Billy’s job to cut the man down to size just now.

“I’m not,” Billy says, coming closer. “I’m not laughing.”

There’s fury in the man’s eyes, so he adds by way of an explanation, “When I first enlisted- on HMS Wanderer that was- we hit a storm off the coast of Africa. We ran under close-reefed capstan for a week.” Hickey’s eyes go blank with the lack of understanding. “I’m not kidding!” Billy adds. “I was puking so hard I was almost glad when malaria felled me, and I was deposited on this island, the Comfort Cove, to recuperate. Well, the Comfortless Cove, that’s what we called it.”

“Not everyone has your years of adventures,” Hickey says, malice draining from his face. “Tell me.”

“I did nothing half the crew hasn’t done,” Billy repeats his mantra to the back of Hickey’s had as the man bends to puke again.

“I’m not asking of half the crew,” Hickey says without lifting his head. “I want to hear about you.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Billy thinks, why not. There are still a couple of hours to kill before he’s needed again, and while he might feel some shame about describing his adventures when, truth be told, he’s a lowly nobody, a petty officers’ steward with frayed nerves who by rights has no place on this expedition, Hickey is interested in his adventures- interested in _him_ , so where’s the harm in that? Recounting the tale seems borderline boastful, but then, the man is coughing up bile into the bucket while listening, so he’s not the only one who has a thing or two to be ashamed of here. 

***

He doesn’t quite notice when it becomes a tradition, Hickey invading his berth, hovering over his shoulder as he sits polishing the officers’ silverware, following him around like a shadow with the same refrain. Tell me. Tell me about yourself, like you are somebody. Billy occasionally makes an effort to shoo the man away and steer him towards more productive occupations, but it’s never more than half-hearted. The tale of operations against slavers in Africa (“there were these pens where the slavers kept people- they would shudder to put cattle there, I’m sure, when at home, but that wasn’t home, and humanity doesn’t travel well, I found”) takes them all the way across open water, and within sight of Greenland. The snow along the water is largely gone in the early summer, but lingers farther up the shore, a white mass hovering like a colossal floating city in the clouds. His nightmares do not quite subside with the telling, but relent somewhat, as if retelling them in other words helps him take possession of that which possessed him before. It also makes it easier to remember how much they laughed at the time, the horror of what they’ve seen mixing with giddy elation.

Billy is never quite sure what keeps him so warm, the memories of other times and other climes, or the proximity of a restless scrawny body. Hickey stands ever closer, placing a hand on his shoulder during dramatic moments, playfully elbowing him in the ribs when he tells the tale of past mischief.

“Did you know I was there for the attack of Chingkiang?” Billy asks, giving Hickey reason to linger next to him for a while longer. “The same battle that made Commander Fitzjames famous?”

Of course, Hickey doesn’t know that. How could he? It’s the officers that are basked in glory, whereas all that’s demanded of an ordinary seaman is to not die, or die, as if that makes no difference whatsoever.

“That's smart of you, keeping close to the officers,” Hickey nods, as if reading his thoughts. “Someone should remind them that they’d be nowhere without us ordinary folk.”

Billy almost laughs in his face. Does the man really believe that he became a lowly domestic by choice? Does he not realize that all his years of living in death’s pocket did not even earn him the rank of an able seaman, and that he could only join up in the domestic capacity, or not at all? Billy’d be the first to admit that he’s not smart, and he’s willing to overlook a lot, but this sort of ignorance doesn't square with any sort of biography that could bring Hickey here legitimately.

The man doesn’t notice the flurry of thoughts on Billy’s face though: he looks down to roll a cigarette, and, lighting it up, passes it to Billy. It’s still warm and wet from the touch of Hickey’s lips when Billy takes the first nervous drag, and just like that, he understands two things at once: Hickey has no place being here now; and he, Billy, cannot do without him. Whoever else he might have been before, wherever else he travelled, Hickey’s a caulker now, and he dutifully fills the empty places, never letting the ugly darkness beyond creep in. Billy looks at him with possessive hunger, knowing full well that he has no right to want him, never mind to have him, and sees an answering yearning in the man’s eyes.

Oh, he thinks, and laughs until he coughs, his throat scratchy with smoke. He stayed out of trouble for so long, and then the trouble found him.

***

Peglar finds him the night before they are due to stop at Disko Bay to transfer the remaining cargo from the provisions ship to their hold.

“I hear that you are chummy with that Hickey bloke,” Peglar says, running a hand over Gibson’s books and squinting at the titles.

Billy shrugs, then says with a malice he didn’t know he possessed, “Didn’t know you could read.”

Billy expects anger in response, but there’s a vulnerable smile on Peglar’s lips when he says, “I’m learning.” Then he instantly becomes sterner. “I would stay away from him, if I were you. Something is off about him.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m saying that as a friend. He knows less about Navy life than any beardless volunteer. I’ve asked around, but nobody served with him before. Something is wrong about him. You develop a nose for this things, you know.”

While this is Billy’s impression as well, he resents the truth of it. “There are plenty of long-shore loafers and jailbirds in our ranks, but none unreformed, as it were.”

“Not on this expedition though. It’s too much of a risk, when we can get stuck out in the Arctic for more than one winter. I will be making a recommendation that he should be sent home from Disko Bay, along with others unfit for service.”

“I see,” Billy says, chill running down his spine at the thought, then adds, biding time, “Who else?”

“The armourer and the sailmaker are useless at their trade. Several men on Erebus too, from what I hear.”

And who, exactly, is Peglar, to decide with haughty indifference who’s worthy of service, and who isn’t? Not daring to look him in the eye even as he’s dredging up the past that should by all rights be dead and buried, Billy says, “Well, one could say that you are hardly an ornament to the service either.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath, and then Peglar says, “What makes you say that?”

“We were on Borneo together, remember?” Billy says with weariness, and cannot bring himself to regret it. “There are things you are willing to forget, but you cannot wipe the memories of everyone who witnessed your missteps.”

Peglar was lashed for sodomy, and yet here he is, captain of the foretop and none the less respected for it, whereas Billy, who never so much as breathed out of line, is a skulking domestic. Ironic, really, that it should be Peglar, who found the way for Billy to join up and put a word in for him, who’d also try to take away the only person making the expedition tolerable.

***

Billy’s about to climb down to a small dinghy ferrying the men from Terror to Disko Bay when Hickey yells after him.

“Wait, I’m coming with you!”

“Shouldn’t you be scrubbing the deck, Mr. Hickey?” he asks, but not a second before they are safely on shore. He might be apprehensive about Hickey’s lack of discipline, but he’s too grateful for the company to enforce it.

“I wish you’d call me Cornelius,” the man says, almost wistfully, as they start walking up the hill along the muddy tracks that pass for a road here, and then adds with a snort, “If you wanted me on my knees, I’ll have you know that there are easier ways.”

It takes a while to sink in, and even then, Billy’s almost sure he’s misheard it, his half-formed desires whispering outrageous lies into his hears.

Heart beating in his throat, he says, “It’s just that Peglar doesn’t like you.”

“Good then that I have no love for Peglar either.”

“Don’t you understand?” Billy wheels around on his heels, towering over Cornelius. “He’s going to recommend you to be sent home. You cannot be seen shirking duty anymore. You have no more than a week to prove yourself, and yet here you are, and here I am, not stopping you because I care too much for an extra hour of your company when you have duty owed from now till we reach India at least, and we-”

“I’m glad that you care for my company,” Cornelius cuts through his tirade with a smile. “I’d be in a real pickle if you didn’t.”

“You cannot be saying that sort of thing,” Billy says after a pause.

“Whyever not?”

Because it’s unseemly and dangerous for lowly nobodies like them to forget their station, that’s why, Billy wants to say, but then, Cornelius always saw Billy as a somebody, and believed himself to be a somebody too, no doubt, all the attendant risks be damned. So Billy says nothing and starts walking to outpace the implications of what Cornelius said earlier, but the squelching of mud under the man’s boots follows him, proving the effort futile.

The town, as ill luck would have it, affords little by way of distraction. It’s more of a fishing village, really, and the turf huts stretching up the slope look like boils on the hunched back of the beast rearing up from the sea. Billy stops when they reach the top of the street, and looks back at where they came from.

Down by the docks, they are slaughtering the beasts, red rivulets in the gutters visible even at this distance: the last fresh meat they’ll see till they are out in the Pacific. Billy watches slabs of meat being ferried to the boats along with the casks of provisions, and tries not to think of butchered bodies littering the streets of Chingkiang.

Either misinterpreting his scowl of disgust or reading it too well, Cornelius says, “They are not that different from Jesus, when you come right down to it. We drink his blood and partake of his flesh to be saved, and their flesh and blood likewise.”

Billy shudders against the chill wind. Some contrary instinct in him prompts him to say, “The Hartnell brothers and their friends are hitting the brothel. This might be our the chance until China.”

“I’ll pass,” Cornelius says, catching his eyes, and weaves his fingers through his, shrugging as if the world was a little too small and pinched at the shoulders.

From the top of the hill the officers supervising the stowage of cargo look small like ants, and as irrelevant. The Terror is sitting quite low in the water, Billy notes, like a ship in distress.

“I’d be surprised if we don’t draw 18 feet,” he says to fill the silence, without letting Cornelius’s hand go.

The words mean little to Cornelius, and that fact means less yet to Billy. Slowly, they start their walk back to the harbour.

***

The chance for Cornelius to prove his usefulness presents itself the very next day. Or, rather, Billy finds it, and then has to spend a good half hour looking for Cornelius to shepherd him to the deck.

“We’ll be trying out our collapsible life-boats,” he explains, marching the unwilling Cornelius forwards. “They are stored outboard, frapped to by gripes against the bulwarks, and Lieutenant Little decided that-”

“So, that’s what those are,” Cornelius says without much interest. Sometimes Billy suspects that he must be playing up his ignorance, because nobody choosing to spend a year in the Navy is likely to show as little investment in the life of the ship.

Billy pushes him towards a small gathering prepared to lower the boats into the water, and stands back. He enjoys Cornelius’s company, knows, not without a pang of jealousy, that other seamen do too, for the man is nothing if not entertaining, so he cannot see, really, why Cornelius cannot just blend in, show a bit of fervour at just the right moment, share in the joys and toils of the crew.

He’s too far back to see what happens, but he feels it instantly, attuned through years of service to sense minute changes in the air when everything goes wrong. His breath hitches in the brittle quiet a second before he hears the splash of water, his heart skips a beat a moment before someone mumbles, “Good riddance,” and then there’s a stampede to peer over the side.

He knows who fell before he reaches the railing, and knows equally that it was he, Billy, who killed him, pushing an ill-equipped man into a dangerous task for a ghostly chance of something more, for a sliver of hope to prolong the pleasure of his company. Maybe he did it on purpose, a darker side of him instantly suggests; maybe he didn’t want the sticky awkwardness of temptation that could get him lashed, or worse.

The boat that was lowered earlier rows frantically, unwieldy like an overturned beetle, and after several failed attempts, Cornelius is dragged out of the water, a limp tiny form in bulky clothes. On the bottom of the boat, he doesn’t move.

Billy elbows his way through the small crowd to be the first to catch Hickey as he’s lifted back on board, but Dr. McDonald gets there first.

“He’s alive,” and that’s all Billy hears, all Billy needs to hear, everything after that—hypothermia, warming the patient, body heat—blurring into a meaningless string of sounds as Cornelius coughs up seawater. There’s some cheer, decidedly half-hearted, and then more bustle as the men continue to lower the second boat.

“I’ll take care of him,” he tells Dr. McDonald, and several men help him to drag Cornelius’s unconscious form to his cabin.

Billy’s not sure if he knows what he’s doing. Wet clothes cling to Cornelius’s body like bandages to a wound, the body’s clammy and awkward like a frog, and thin, so very thin, bespeaking years of malnutrition and hard living. Making quick work of his own clothes, Billy dives under his blanket and presses Cornelius close.

Cornelius’s body is so cold that the touch hurts, so Billy pulls the blanket up over their heads to warm up the air, breathes in the dead salty sea smell and his own sweat, then breathes out until his lungs constrict painfully. The man next to him doesn’t move, doesn’t even twitch at the touch, and for a horrifying second, Billy’s almost certain he’s clinging to a corpse. He tries to find the pulse on his wrist, but his own hands shake so badly that their tremor is all he feels. He presses the wrist to his lips, skin cold against his mouth. His lips go numb with the chill, so he licks at the skin, warming a patch, and then he can feel Cornelius’s pulse race under his tongue, the frantic tide of his life insistent and violent and _there_.

When Billy looks up, he meets Cornelius’s wild gaze, peering at him through wet strands of hair. Something in his beady eyes reaches across the years and makes his heart twitch with fear. And then he laughs, realizing whom the man reminds him of.

“What?” Cornelius huffs, his dignity easily offended even at the brink of death.

“Nothing, it’s just that I had a pet rat once. A bedraggled little thing it was at first, ma caught it in a trap, and I kept it as a pet. You remind me of it.”

“Just when I thought this day couldn’t get any worse,” Cornelius sighs, and then closes the last inches of distance separating them, and kisses him.

There’s nothing but a couple of thin planks separating them from the seamen’s mess, and yet here they are, Billy holding a freezing naked man in his arms, and this veritable, absolute madman is kissing him within an inch of his life. He seizes up with fear at first, only to be stunned speechless, not a second later, by the fierceness of his own desire, numb, unable to deny either himself or Cornelius. The man pushes against him, then writhes to lie atop him, all angles and bones, an awkward human weight, undeniably alive. Billy bucks up to meet him, pushing his tongue against, then past Cornelius’s lips, tastes seawater, tastes blood, bites his lips, clutches his shoulders, hoping he’ll leave bruises, something to prove later that this moment happened.

“You’ll live, I see,” he pants, smiling against Cornelius’s cheek.

Cornelius laughs, then asks, “What happened to your rat?”

“Me ma drowned it.” He shrugs. He cried, and begged her not to, and then let go and forgot it until this moment, all those years later.

***

But that was years ago, and this is now, and he will not let Cornelius go. If Hickey goes back to England, he’ll return with him. He doesn’t think he can suffer the endless rocking and moaning of the ship with just his nightmares for company, and even if he can, he doesn’t want to. He wants Cornelius here, with him, close, anchored in him, safe.

They are in the farthest corner of the hold, surrounded by the crates that will not come in useful until their third year in the ice, that is, that will never come in useful, guarding them against a hungry and dark future, and against curious eyes. Billy leans on the crates, hastily opening himself up with oiled fingers, as Cornelius's cold finger pokes in next to his. Heat radiates from the stretch inside, and for the first time since they came within sight of Greenland, he feels properly warm. His muscles clench, he can feel Cornelius's fingers tremble inside him.

“Do it.”

A push, his body resisting the intrusion; Cornelius’s dick slides aimlessly between his buttocks, punches the back of his balls.

“It's coming in anyway, so you might as well relax,” Cornelius hisses against his ear.

His heart aches with horrible pity for the man, familiar with the mechanics of it, but not the intimacy, his language limited to this rot, having no words for himself or those he might bed other than a pillowmuncher, a molly, a backgammon player. Where did he hear the words he repeated just now? Billy breathes in and out, clenches and then relaxes, and then, the intimate touch and scratch inside.

When he casts his eyes down, he can see that Cornelius has to stand on tiptoe to rock into him, and that makes his throat clench with tenderness. He pushes back to meet Cornelius' thrust.

“I love you,” he says as Cornelius pushes in, his voice breaking into a moan on the last word. Cornelius freezes before giving a thrust that pushes him against the crates. Defiantly, Billy repeats, measuring the rhythm of each thrust with his words, “I. Do. I. Do. Love. You.”

It feels important to get this out before he’s reduced to mere sounds; he feels soft and squelchy, so he reaches down and touches the rim of his flesh where Cornelius moves.

For the first time in his life, he's daring to claim what he wanted, reach and take and give, hungry, devouring. He will not betray this, or so he thinks.


End file.
